As the recent handing out of honours to sacked ministers shows, we are addicted to gong-giving. But only one honour in British life really matters – appearing on Desert Island Discs. This celebration of the programme's 70th anniversary acknowledges that fact, pointing out that while 2,500 people a year get honours, just 42 are cast away. Sir George Young CH is unlikely to make it – DID tries to maintain standards, even if politics doesn't.

This lavishly produced but questionably organised book combines a history of the Radio 4 programme with 87 interviews broken down by decade. There is also a comprehensive list of the 3,000 or so interviewees, and I'm still looking up ones I've never heard of – Dora Labbette, Binnie Hale, TEB Clarke, GO Nickalls … Not enough men with initials appear on DID these days, and music-hall stars – a Roy Plomley speciality – are also in short supply.

Plomley, one of those Wodehousian public-school figures common in broadcasting in the 1930s and 40s, devised the programme in November 1941. He was a 27-year-old would-be actor, and his brainwave defined the rest of his life. He realised from the outset that success would depend on a varied cast list. "Dance-band leaders, actors, members of the Brains Trust, film stars, writers, child prodigies, ballet dancers and all sorts of people could be included," he wrote in his initial submission to the BBC. DID is a world of happy juxtapositions – Tony and Lionel Blair, Michael and Leslie Howard, Roger and Patrick Moore. It is fitting that the original choice for inaugural interviewee, philosopher CEM Joad, was indisposed and replaced by comedian Vic Oliver, who was starring in Get a Load of This at the London Hippodrome. An interleaving of pop and posh has remained the key. The early programmes were scripted, with guests doing no more than introduce their favourite discs. "It began life as a record programme," Sean Magee writes in his introduction, "not as some early incarnation of In the Psychiatrist's Chair."

The scripts were dropped in the early 50s – the programme had been shelved in 1946 but revived in 1951 – and a more conversational tone adopted. Sometimes the interviews could enter serious territory, as when Spike Milligan discussed his loneliness in 1956 in the first of his two appearances on the programme. But Plomley was certainly no Anthony Clare, and by the end of his 43-year stint – as Michael Palin realised when he appeared on the programme in 1979 – he was very out of touch. "He has seen only two Python shows and no Ripping Yarns," complained Palin in his diary.

I recently replayed Plomley's interview with Jan Morris from 1983 and he is feeble (his fawning interview with Princess Margaret, included in the 87 here, is even worse). By contrast, when Morris came back 20 years later, Sue Lawley was relentless and surgical. Lawley, who presented the programme from 1988 to 2006, is the best of the four interviewers so far. Michael Parkinson (1986-88) is generally recognised to have been the least effective, with Kirsty Young somewhere in between. Her recent interview with Peter Ackroyd, an intriguing figure crying out for someone to take him on, was disappointing. Lawley would have made a better fist of it.

Plomley's strong suit was his sense of the absurd, and his encounter with theatrical manager Sir Harry Whitlohn is especially memorable. Whitlohn as a child had met Brahms and played him a simple melody of his own devising, which became the cello theme in the composer's third symphony. Whitlohn chose street sounds from Liechtenstein as one of his discs and a mountain as his luxury.

Give or take the ridiculous chunks of stock social analysis ("politically it was a topsy-turvy decade"), the potted history in the book is more interesting than the workmanlike summaries of the interviews, the selection of which seems largely random. One could easily come up with another 87 to replace these, though some – with the magnificently testy Marlene Dietrich, for instance – would have to appear on any all-time list.

Part of the problem is that we are given only short extracts, padded out with descriptions of the subject. The book does, though, offer many incidental pleasures. When Plomley tells Gracie Fields the desert island is "quite deserted, nobody about, no warmth, no comfort", she says that it "sounds like some of the places I used to play on tour". Harry Secombe requests as his luxury a collapsible concrete model of Broadcasting House, with a cast-iron commissionaire and plastic announcers, so he could imagine "all the lads working their nuts off" while he was lying on the beach sunbathing. We learn that soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf has been unfairly traduced: she only chose seven discs on which she was the soloist; it was pianist Moura Lympany who wanted all eight records to be her own. And it is delightful to find that campaigner Shami Chakrabarti and Jeremy Clarkson are as one – at least in their choice of David Bowie's "Heroes".

Herbert Morrison always carried a list of eight records in his wallet in case he was asked to appear on the programme. Naturally, I do the same, and sympathise with the man from Lincoln who wrote to the producer, Monica Chapman, in 1962: "I listen regularly to Desert Island Discs, and although I feel fairly sure you would not think me sufficiently illustrious to appear on your programme, I am sending you a rough autobiography just in case the idea might be thought worth while." "I have added your name to our long list of possible castaways," replied Chapman. Perhaps he is still waiting for the call.